Lathe tooling with coolant porting ??

[Mike@Lustre]

Curious if anyone has experience with lathe tooling that is ported . One of the local reps brought in some flyers with part-off blades and tool blocks with coolant ports , and also seen some CNMG style holders with the clamp ported and plumbed for coolant .

 

My questions are

 

is there a increase in  insert life ?

Do the tiny ported holes clog up over time ?

has the tooling failed due to the coolant ports ?

 

[Sticky]

I run it exclusively. Some of the parting and grooving tools are Iscar and Ph horn. All the stick tooling is Sandvik, I think they call it "high precision coolant", the ports are part of the tool and not the clamp like some manufactures.

 

I only run filtered coolant. I am sure the nozzles would clog quickly without filtered coolant. Filtered coolant all by itself usually gains about 10% in tool life, so imo there is no reason not to start filtering.

 

Having the coolant focused right at the cutting edge has been particularly helpful machining 304. The tool life increase from that aspect hasn't been over substantial, as we had a pretty coolant system before, but what it does do is add process stability. No longer do coolant lines get knocked out of the correct position by chips or careless operators. So from the running unattended aspect, they have made a large difference.

 

My only gripe is that the coolant nozzles are quite small. I think with a 100+ psi pump they really should be at least twice the size, which would be really helpful for blasting off long stringy chips when finishing.

[Mike@Lustre]

Cool some good info

 

We run  303 SS 90% of the time and we go lights out Monday night thru Thursday night so tool life is a big concern . All the machines have  SS filters that we clean out once a month , we have done lots of tooling tests as well and pretty much have the grades that work the best for our products .

 

Part-off tooling is a issue at times , every so often we smoke out a tool on the night run , put that is one of the costs of going lights out for 14hrs .

 

Right now I think the CNMG style may be worth trying out on certain jobs we only get a couple hundred parts before the insert looses it's nose radius .

 

With drills and such the coolant holes don't seem to clog with SS but on Aluminum I have lost a few tools due to the holes packing up and getting clogged and going dry .

 

Cost wise it's something we have yet to go over still , and see if the gain is there for the extra $$$ and hassle of running coolant lines to the tools .

 

Thanks

[Sticky]

If your drills are getting clogged now, these types of tools will definitely get clogged. I run 10 micron filtration on my machines. 25 works good enough for most applications, but I do lots of stuff were I need a 16-32ra finish, the 10 micron filters make that much easier. Keep in mind that higher level of filtration like that can cause coolant foaming if you have soft water. You might need to artificially harden your sump if this is the case.

 

There is some hassle involved plumbing wise initially. After you set it up it the first time it should be pretty pain free.

 

For us, the value was in the process stability.

[Redfire427]

We use the jet-stream toolholders from Seco. We also use a Sandvik parting blade and block with a 220 psi coolant pump. I really don't understand the necessity of filtering the coolant as most of the fine swarf would settle on the bottom of the coolant tank and the coolant pump is spaced off the bottom of the tank. As long as you keep the coolant tank full, anything floating on the surface would never get to the pump screen anyways. For what its worth, I've run multiple lathes for 20+ years and have never once seen any kind of plugged lines. We also cut a wide variety of materials.

 

Getting back to your questions, the tool holder cost is much higher, however, we have experienced a minor improvement in tool life. The largest benefit is removing swarf away from the cut. No plugged holes or failures. Coolant thru parting blades are awesome, however, some materials are extremely difficult to part even with the benefit of constant coolant at the cut. If the insert breaks ..................... well, you'll be ordering a new one.

 

Carmen

[Mike@Lustre]

Does the coolant help increase chip breakage on smaller cuts ?? .

 

We do a fair amount of .010" finish cuts just to true up the OD of the part on aluminum and SS and we always get bird nesting/stringy hay from the small cut .  If possible I'd like to reduce the hay and get a little chip being produced instead.

[absolute technologies]

Does the coolant help increase chip breakage on smaller cuts ?? .

 

We do a fair amount of .010" finish cuts just to true up the OD of the part on aluminum and SS and we always get bird nesting/stringy hay from the small cut .  If possible I'd like to reduce the hay and get a little chip being produced instead.

High Pressure coolant changes the way the material shears so yes it helps break a chip. Stainless steel is still hard to break chips on finish cuts and sometimes a little bigger finish cut helps no make string.

 

Take a look at Chip Blaster website they have some good technical information about HP coolant

 

http://www.chipblaster.com/

 

Cheers!

Len Dye